swombat.com

daily articles for founders

Swombat.com is no longer actively maintained, but all the posts here are still available for your use. The original objective was to regularly summarise and comment on the best articles for founders each day, as well as occasionally post our my own thoughts and advice, so that you could read the most useful articles while focusing on building your own startup. As most of the articles in the founders library were selected to be "evergreens", I hope you still find them useful!

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Very interesting review of a design process, by Jeannie Nguyen of Lexity, about the process they followed to arrive at their current design.

We took a couple of months to design and build our new site, and threw it all away at the last minute - building what you can see now at lexity.com.

(...)

I wondered if it'd be crazy to scratch up all the work we've been doing for the past month, and to start over again. To just throw away the time it took to make all the drawings and for Kent (aka our Web Guy) to build all of this. I pitched the idea anyways.

It brought us back to the idea that our company is built on 3 columns: affordability, effectiveness, and simplicity. It made us rethink our site design. Did we really need all the festive colors? Did we really need our pigs to fly and animate? Did we really need Sophie to drive through the city? Then we realized our website design should reflect the third column our company was built on: simplicity.

It's important to have the courage to make brave decisions in design. It would be interesting to see the results of an A/B test of those two designs, though.